Marketing agencies using AI in workflows serve more clients

Of all the many industries, it’s marketing where AI is no longer an “innovation lab” side project but embedded in briefs, production pipelines, approvals, and media optimisation. A WPP iQ post published in December, based on a webinar with WPP and Stability AI, shows what AI deployment in daily operations looks like.

Here, we’re talking about a focus on the practical constraints that determine whether AI changes daily work or merely adds another layer of complexity or tooling.

Brand accuracy a repeatable capability

Marketing agencies’ AI treats brand accuracy as something to be engineered. WPP and Stability AI note that off-the-shelf models “don’t come trained on your brand’s visual identity”, so outputs can often look generic. The companies’ remedy is fine-tuning, that is, training models on brand-specific datasets so the model learns the brand playbook, including style, look, and colours. Then, these elements can be reproduced consistently.

WPP’s Argos is a prime example. After fine-tuning a model for the retailer, the team described how the model picked up details beyond the characters, including lighting and subt...